SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema :> Explanation of Practice
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LIS. Discussion Note 102
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JS = John Sowa
John,
I am really trying to focus on helping Matthew analyze the content
of his LIS material and to take it through what I would see as the
next step of a step-wise refinement in its level of formalization.
Matthew said some things at one point of our discussions that led
me to believe that he views a starter document as a start and not
a finish, and so I will proceed on that assumption until I become
convinced that I was misled. It is evident that different people
would do this in different ways, but I'm proceeding on good faith
in the same way that I used to do it when people paid me to do it.
Of course, people are more likely to value your contribution when
they are paying you to make it, but that is neither here nor there --
which I guess is the LIS definition of "abstract". At any rate,
maybe this is the occasion, and maybe it will serve both SUO's
and this pilgrim's progress, if I rationalize my method just
a bit more.
JS: I don't know who taught you that, but I strongly
recommend that you forget it as quickly as possible:
JA: It's partly just the way that I was taught to do things,
taking into account the independence of other people's
thinking process, and partly because this method leaves
a clean copy of reference material in the Archives that
can be reused by link again and again on future occasions
without being trucked up by what is likely to be a dated
or perishable remark.
We have what I believe are commonly called "artistic differences".
Reading the original sources first and thinking about them later
is the way that I learned, when I learned best, and it was also
the way that I was taught to teach by the teachers who taught
me to teach. No doubt there are many here who have nothing
to learn from me, but if there are those, here or anywhere,
who think that they have nothing to learn from Peirce, or
Blake, Chang and Keisler, J.L. Kelley, Lambek and Scott,
Serge Lang, Leibniz, MacLane, Manes and Arbib, Riemann,
or Wayne and Schuster, for that matter, then I can but
say that they have a lot to learn.
JS: Forget that. If I am looking for quotations from
CSP or Blake, I don't go to the SUO archives.
I might mention the factors of colligation, consilience,
and context here, but of course you know all about that.
JS: And forget that nonsense about dated or perishable
remarks. Everything on SUO is extremely perishable.
Speak for yourself. Sorry, too easy. But I do beg to differ.
The SUO and Ontology Archives, and SUO itself, for that matter,
will be precisely as perishable as we choose to make them. And
others, of course, will get what we deserve on account of it.
Up to the present time, I have personally placed more material
that deserves to be called "standard upper ontology" in the SUO
and ONT archives than anything else in the whole SUO neighborhood.
True, the current fashion sense of some of our neighbors, who recoil
at the "thoughts of generations ago" (TOGA's), has led to most of this
material being consigned to the bargain basement of the Ontology list,
but I am hopeful that fashions will change, as they always seem to do.
JS: The most important thing to do is to be RELEVANT, and to
get your point across as simply and directly as possible.
Relevance is relative, of course,
but I am more concerned with the
long run success of SUO than yet
another quick fix sound byte.
Look, we both know what works, what always seems to work, in the short run.
And we've both been around long enough to know just how short the short run
can be. I myself have lived through decades and passed through places when
and where the field of AI was the Rodney Dangerfield of computer science,
when and where saying "knowledge base" instead of "data base" was enough
to end the job interview right then and there. Maybe things are better
where you are now, for the moment, but I have some acquaintance with
the factors that historically led to this recurring lack of respect,
and worse than that, this recurring lack of success in AI. And I
shall not pass that way again. So I am doing what I can to keep
the prospective "Journal Of Knowledge Engineering" from being
a JOKE that we can't laugh off.
Timing is of the Essence.
Jon Awbrey
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